Well, er, it turns out that the correct answer is: "Never mind."

Per Kaj Arno, MySQL VP Community, MySQL Server is Open Source, even Backup extensions.

You can get the Slashdot crowd's viewpoint here, MySQL Reverses Decision On Closed Source.

Much as I like to rationalize and "support" open source vendor policies, no matter how ill-conceived, as I did last month, I'm much happier when open source companies make an honest effort to keep their software actually open.

Yay MySQL.

MySQL Server is still (and always was) open source. The difference is not (as I might have implied yesterday) that the Enterprise product was going to be different. What's actually happening is that if you are an Enterprise customer (meaning, you're paying the big bucks for the Enterprise license), you get some extra "add-ons".

Somehow, calling them "add-ons" made a big difference (for me, anyway) in understanding what's going on: Sun is giving their customers another reason to pay extra for Enterprise MySQL. The add-on in question, this time, is online backup. If you want to do online backup with MySQL at this point, you have two options:

1. Buy the Enterprise edition.
2. Program your own online backup add-on, or hire someone else to do it.

Sun Senior VP and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos spelled it out, pretty much in those words.

I believe in free and open software as much as the next person. I also think that companies "selling" open source software have not just the right but the obligation (to their shareholders) to find a business model that allows them to continue to publish open source software. Enterprise customers have special needs--needs that generally don't intersect with the needs of most individuals or small groups who are using the software--and that as a result, it makes sense to have enterprise customers get the extra add-ons as part of their licensing fees.

Am I wrong?

Here's the story at ComputerWorld: MySQL reserves features for paying customers; open-source community up in arms.

Oddly enough, though, the story seems to have originated on Jeremy Cole’s blog:
Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise. No press releases, and the news articles I've seen so far seem to be pointing to this blog entry (and MySQL honcho Marten Mickos' response/confirmation to the entry) as their primary source.

That tells me one of two things is happening: either Sun/MySQL is trying to pull a fast one and sneak this new development under everyone's radar, or else this is just business as usual and not anything to get upset about--or at least, not be surprised about.

You can read about "user outrage" in the ComputerWorld article, as well as on Slashdot (Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL). But Sun has to find a way to make that MySQL acquisition pay off, somehow.

On the other hand, as Dana Blankenhorn points out here (Did Sun just make mySQL closed source?), MySQL started limited source code access to its Enterprise version last year--if you want to see the code, you've got to be a paying customer. That's fine: if you've paid for an Enterprise license, you get to see the source code (and do what you want with it).

It shouldn't surprise anyone when a company that runs an open source project tries to make it pay off. The good news is that there is a huge--and strong--open source MySQL community, and that (as Mickos pointed out) anyone who likes could develop their own, free and open, version of the features that aren't going to make it into the community version.

I'm sure we'll be hearing more interested news from the open source database players in days and weeks to come (including from me!). One of the exciting aspects of this development is that it illustrates and illuminates some of the most critical issues facing paying and non-paying users of open source software, as well as the vendors who are trying to build their businesses on free software.

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch.

For the record, BigTable is Google's "compressed, high performance, and proprietary database system" (per Wikipedia). And Amazon's SimpleDB should sound familiar: I've written about it before, here Amazon SimpleDB and here More about Amazon's SimpleDB....

So--if true--this could be very good news for anyone who wants enterprise (and I mean BIG ENTERPRISE) database systems, for minimal up-front investment, from two of the very biggest Internet database businesses.

• Could it be? Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies? According to Michael Arrington, four big companies--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL--have all announced "support" for OpenID, but haven't put in the effort to make OpenID work to anyone's benefit but their own. Arrington suggests that maybe these Internet biggies are gaming the OpenID universe. A good read.
• Here's a nice OpenID resource: OpenID Status Check: A Guide to Getting and Using Your OpenID. Mostly, a list of links to OpenID resources, but not a bad place to start out if you want to try OpenID yourself. There are even some links to help you roll your own OpenIDs.

Any other good pointers? Let me know...

For whatever reason, the SpicyNodes website gives me little information, but you can see a couple of implementations, here: Daylight Savings Time and here: Family Tree of the Greek Gods.

It reminds me of old-school hypertext, from back in the days before there was such a thing as an Internet protocol for hypertext (HTTP). Kind of neat, but just how likely is it to scale? Let me know what you think.

But before you do that, check this: The Best Tools for Visualization. Lots of good, creative stuff in there, with neat new ways of looking at data from all over.

And, just in case I haven't pointed to it yet, there's IBM's Many Eyes, which has plenty of visualizations as well as plenty of data sets to play with.

Enjoy!

Sure, it's comment on a long-forgotten thread on a ZDNet blog (Why Linux will not displace Windows). The comment is a stunning illustration of how "common sense" fails to account for those things the individual is incapable of imagining. Consider:

You are kidding arent you?

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services?

That sounds preposterous to me.

The comment goes on, but I can't. You'll have to read it yourself, if you must, to get the rest.

And then, there's this: They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know. Not everyone who likes Microsoft is happy with Vista. Go ahead, read the article. It's about Microsoft honchos who got burned with the upgrade.]]> http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/ploshin/archives/2008/03/this_cant_be_ha.php?ua= http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/ploshin/archives/2008/03/this_cant_be_ha.php Friday Fun Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:00:00 -0700 You may remember reading about OpenID last November, here (OpenID: Another Approach to Identities), but back then there was significant uncertainty over whether it would catch on.

No longer, though. As reported recently on Slashdot (OpenID Foundation Embraced by Big Players), the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! all joined the OpenID Foundation board.

Seems like a big "game over" for the other contenders for the OpenID niche. Not sure that anyone else was contending for that niche, other than Microsoft, but now they're on board with OpenID, expect to see a Redmonized version of OpenID that's been embraced and extended.

Very interesting and even helpful if you're in the UK: you can use these maps, for example, to figure out whether it's quicker to drive or take a train to a destination, or the fastest mode of transportation for rush hour commuting. But it's also a very neat illustration of how big piles of data can be turned into intelligence. And you don't need me to explain how that kind of intelligence can become "business intelligence" for any business that needs to allocate resources to get people or things from one place to another.

It's all brought to you by mySociety, a charitable project that develops their software as open source; if you're interested in having them do custom mapping for your business, they seem to be willing to do that for a fee (or a donation, I'm not sure how that works in the UK).

So, for Part One of my coverage of the Sun/MySQL deal, I'm mostly going to offer a bunch of links. For example, the Yahoo! News breaking news story: Sun to buy MySQL for $1 billion. You get the basics of the deal here, but you also get some of the issues spelled out for you: Sun is a "server maker"; meaning, they're a hardware company. Other key points to consider:

• Sun expects to spread MySQL into big corporations, who already buy Sun hardware, as well as bolster existing Sun partnerships such as those with IBM and Dell.
• Sun is a software company, too, and an open source software company at that. They, like IBM, see offering open source software as a selling point for their hardware.
• MySQL is dwarfed by the competition from Oracle and Microsoft who dominate in the traditional database market, but MySQL owns the web database market, which is growing (while the more traditional market may be stagnating).

The Yahoo! article gives a pretty good precis of the situation, but you need to dig a little deeper to figure out what exactly is going on. For example, they don't say much about the extent to which Sun controls some very important pieces of software already, including Java, OpenSolaris, StarOffice, NetBeans, and more. Nor do they mention Sun's existing relationship with the other star open source DBMS project, PostgreSQL. For more about Sun, MySQL and PostgreSQL, check out Sun buys MySQL - what about PostgreSQL?, and Sun Purchasing MySQL and PostgreSQL advances from PostgreSQL.

Check back next week for my take on the implications and impact this deal with ultimately have, but in the meantime, here are some of the more interesting articles/blog entries I've found in the past few days about it:

• Ars Technica has a "breaking" story w/ some commentary: Sun targets open source LAMP stack with MySQL acquisition
• Here's the MySQL blog entry announcing the acquisition: Sun acquires MySQL
• Betsy Schiffman at Wired seems to think the deal is overpriced, in Sun Pays Up the Wazoo -- $1 Billion -- for MySQL; she cites analyst estimates of MySQL revenues being just $75-80 million, rather low for a $1 billion deal.
• Dvorak likewise doesn't mince his words; in The Sun-MySQL deal stinks he suggests the deal is horrible (for MySQL) and the only winner will be Oracle (!).
• More from MySQL blogs here Talking to MySQL Founders Monty and David on Sun
• MySQL and Sun - my thoughts from David Van Couvering

For the record, the official press releases here:

• Sun's press release, Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL, Developer of the World's Most Popular Open Source Database
• MySQL's press release: Sun to Acquire MySQL

Paul Tuckfield, the YouTube DBA, speaks about using MySQL at YouTube.

Before I even finished listening to the whole presentation, I got several key points:

• Paul Tuckfield started out at YouTube with a lot of database experience under his belt as an Oracle DBA--but no MySQL experience. Which tells me that switching from Oracle to MySQL, while retaining people, should not be an obstacle.
• MySQL scales, nicely. YouTube has three DBAs. They served 100 million videos a day, back in mid-2006. Without DB2 or Oracle.
• Scaling MySQL to YouTube-scale is non-trivial. Tuckfield talks about using master/slave architecture and doing clever things with replication, to make MySQL work for such a huge database. Which tells me that you're not going to scale anywhere unless you have people who are smart enough to make it work.

The talk, recorded last year at the 2007 MySQL Conference, is only about 40 minutes long, so it's the perfect length for listening during your commute--and Paul is an engaging and funny speaker!

That's right--no more do you need to go to all the trouble of installing a new OS just to get the "look" of having installed a new OS.

Why? That was my own first question, but it's pretty obvious why, if you're running XP (which is what the article is about) you might want to fake running Vista, Mac OS X, Fedora Linux or Ubuntu Linux:

• You've been told to upgrade your perfectly good Windows XP install, but you just don't want to go to all that trouble and expense. So don't! Just install the Vista Transformation Pack, and get the eye candy without the upgrade hassles.


• Do you work in a "Microsoft or Else" office? Want to give your boss/IT manager/colleagues a heart attack? Just install your choice of Linux/Mac OS X clone pack and enjoy the ride.


• Install the Mac OS X pack in your creative departments, so visitors will think your firm is "cool" enough to use Macs.


• More, and endless, prankage. There are just too many good pranks here to count. Tell the office Windows-know-it-all that Ubuntu Linux is now the order of the day, from the top office. Give that annoying hipster temp a Mac "upgrade". Show the MIS nerds how hard core you are, with your new Fedora desktop.

How would you use one of these transformation packs? Share!

Well, there are other smart people who've made more observations, and here are the links to prove it:

• Amazon SimpleDB thoughts by Ryan Barrett at snarfed.org. A nice summary overview to SimpleDB and what makes it interesting, including lots of links.
• Dave Winer writes about Amazon removes the database scaling wall.
• Scott Gilbertson offers Amazon SimpleDB: Your Database in the Cloud on Wired's Blog Network.

On the other hand, it is about installing Windows XP, not Vista; it turns out Pirates Stealing XP Twice as Much as Vista, Microsoft Doesn't Know How to Feel. Given that, perhaps this--How to go back to Windows XP after you have upgraded a Windows XP-based computer to Windows Vista is the most useful article there.

Now, they've got another exciting new beta service on offer, Amazon SimpleDB, which is (per Amazon):

...a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon's proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

For another viewpoint on what SimpleDB is good for, check out what Charles Ying has to say about it in What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB. I'll just quote his bullets on what makes SimpleDB so cool:

• Really large data sets
• Really Fast
• Highly Available - It’s Amazon. Running Erlang. Whoa.
• On demand scaling - Like S3, EC2, with a sensible data metering pricing model
• Schemaless - major cool factor for me here; items are little hash tables containing sets of key, value pairs

What I love about Amazon's range of web/database offerings is that they reduce the entry fee for building massively scalable applications to almost nothing--you can get started for pocket change, and you only start paying through the nose when you start using lots of resources. Even then, the prices are still pretty reasonable.

If you're interested, you can check out the Amazon Developer Connection website, where they have articles like Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3 to help you understand what they're offering and how to use it.

What do you like (or hate) most about Amazon Web Services?